VPC (Value Proposition Canvas) and Madlib’d Value Proposition Statement
Comparative Research Findings
Participatory Roadmap
User Story Map (with MVP indicated)
Assumptions Map (with riskiest assumptions called out)
Experience Prototypes
See below.
What is your project concept?
Memento is a service making it easy to capture important moments and share those with your closest friends and family by automatically delivering personalized scrapbooks to your door.
Why is your value proposition statement correct (e.g., the research says so!)?
We initially believed that Memento would be a fun way to use photos and give them greater meaning. However, during our initial and follow-up interviews, we discovered a broader common theme – keeping track of memories isn’t easy. Our interviewees were sifting through thousands of photos in their camera roll, spending hours making photo albums, scrapbooks, and journals, and sometimes outright forgetting details of their most important memories. We make sure that stress, time commitment, and fear of forgetting aren’t a concern when it comes to remembering core memories.
Giving photos more meaning
- “I look through my camera roll…but I don’t actively ever seek out remembering things or being nostalgic. Yet it’s not bc I want to remember and go back to remember, I am super nostalgic”
- “Lots of printed photos at home, mostly in picture frames for decoration”
Sharing memories with friends and family
- “Life gets so busy and it’s easy to grow apart from old friends.”
- “My college friends and I have recently been sending each other vids on Snapchat memories”
Keeping track of memories
- “I feel like I forget things super easily”
- “I have a bad memory. So much is happening it all muddles together.”
- “Many days feel the same and it’s hard to keep track of what has happened”
- “Taking lots of pictures helps with remembering what has happened recently “
What motivated your choices for the MVP?
Our service requires a few core components to provide genuine value to our users.
- Uploading/taking photos
- Adding written captions and prompt responses
- Theme suggestions and selection
- Shipping & delivery
Our MVP aims to address these components as directly as possible. We will build a photo upload system, notifications with daily prompts, a “wizard-of-oz” theme recommendation engine using a deterministic quiz, and hand-creating the actual scrapbooks.
What is the goal of the project; how are users’ lives changed by your product?
Memento sparks creativity, builds genuine human connections, and brings joy to the world. We recognize that people’s lives are busy, but with busy lives come a lot of memories, many of which will be forgotten! We’re helping people document the past without the time investment and stress that comes with trying to do it yourself.
What assumptions are you still worried about?
- Do automatically generated scrapbooks bring the same level of joy as real, self-crafted ones?
- Do people find daily prompts helpful for selecting photos and remembering memories associated with those photos?
- Do quizzes and suggested themes accurately reflect what people want in a scrapbook?
- Are people willing to invest time (albeit a lower amount) into selecting and uploading photos?
What experience prototypes have we done, and why? How did they turn out?
Prototype 1: Daily photos
Medium: iMessage
Assumption Tested: People are willing to invest daily time into this process for a sustained period of time (Are people willing to invest time (albeit a lower amount) into selecting and uploading photos?)
Procedure: Send a text daily to participants during the day with a brief ping to submit one photo from their day
Results:
- Most testers found it easy to quickly submit a photo throughout their day
- Some testers forgot to submit a photo even with the end-of-day reminder
- People submitted a broad range of photos (food, friends, nature)
- Testers hoped we were going to do something cool with the photos
Prototype 2: Daily prompts
Medium: iMessage
Assumption Tested: People are willing to invest daily time into this process for a sustained period of time (Do people find daily prompts helpful for selecting photos and remembering memories associated with those photos?)
Procedure: Send a text daily to participants at the start of their day with a short prompt to keep in mind (potentially) for their photo submission, or to enter as a note entry
Are there experience prototypes that you may need to build next?
Prototype 3: Theme personalization quiz
Medium: Google Forms/Buzzfeed/Typeform
Assumption Tested: People are content with the level of personalization the platform affords them
Procedure: Instruct participants to complete a Buzzfeed-esque personality quiz to generate a personalized theme for their photo journal
Exp Prototype 4: Browsing Themes
Medium: Google Slides
Assumption Tested: Users are interested in interacting creatively with other people by viewing and/or using other people’s themes for convenience’s sake.
Procedure: Instruct participants to browse through a small database of themes created by “other users”. Ask them if they would use any of the available themes for their scrapbook over taking the time to create their own theme and how they would interact with any of the themes (i.e. leave a like, leave a comment, etc.)
How viable is our product as far as we know, with the assumptions we currently have and the experience prototypes we have done?
From our perspective, Memento is a viable service to build. The technology is straightforward (photo management, mobile app and UI, subscription payments, etc.). A bigger concern at scale is how these scrapbooks would actually be created.
Since we are in the process of doing our experience prototypes, we are still unsure if users are willing to put in the time and effort into the process and also if they derive the projected amount of joy we believe the product can bring.
What advice do you want from your reviewers?
- Does uploading photos daily feel like a burden?
- How much joy does an automatically curated scrapbook bring?
- Do daily prompts help with finding photos that are meaningful?
